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Contemporary art from Haiti:                          Gino Tintin - 21 Nations

29/5/2016

 
​In this large, colourful and imposing painting by the Haitian artist Gino Tintin, the 21 Nations of its title refer to the ancient pre-colonial West African nations, for example the Ibo, Nago, Petro and Rada.
In religions everything is symbolic, everything refers to something else.
So the Ibo, Nago, Petro and Rada are each associated with a dance rhythm specific to that particular nation.
Here we see the loas, or spirits, from the 21 nations, each with their corresponding flags.
Each loa is represented in a different colour, in the same way that saints in the Christian religion are associated with specific colours.
The depiction of these loas recalls the thin-legged yet dynamic creatures in some of Salvador Dali’s paintings, for example his Temptation of St Anthony, as well as the shadows and distant landscapes often seen in this Spanish Christian painter’s work.
The loas also have shadows. At the centre is the empty chair of the dead, towards which Baron Samedi, the loa who is the Lord of the Graveyard, points his lowered black flag.
Part of the back of the chair merges with the distant mountains. It's also a ladder rising into the sky.​

The vast landscape (look at the clouds) is full of the spirits of the dead, who reside there for a year. Then they are released into a new life.
Picture

Themersons show

12/5/2016

 
Excellent news! 
       The sales figures for Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination are catching up on the success of Eisenstein on the Audiovisual! Musician Joe Lasqo quoted from Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination (my text on Maya Deren) for the Electric Shadow Theater event in San Francisco - a big thank you to filmmaker sound artist Chris Lynn (https://framingsounds.com), for this info re this PianoFight music and film evening in the cool Tenderloin quarter.
       Also, copies of Rabelaisdada are for sale at Foyle's in Charing Cross Road, the London Review of Books bookshop, the Hundred Years Gallery, and at the Camden Arts Centre, where there's a wonderful show about the Themersons.
       A Polish artist and writer filmmaking couple, the Themersons provided a mini-avantgarde dynamism amidst the postwar London gloom. They set up Gaberbocchus Press and published Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell (The Good Citizens' Alphabet & History of the World in epitome satire) and also Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, all illustrated by Franciszka Themerson's satirical drawings.
        In the exhibition there's a hilarious film of a Swedish production of Ubu Roi with puppets and cut-outs, a living cartoon. And on display there's a letter from the local librarian in Hampstead, explaining that their books are, in his view
'of such bizarre nature that they are likely to add little to the Library's resources' so he doesn't 'propose to add these volumes' to their stock.
Well, what a recommendation!
       Last, but not least, here are the splendid costume designs created by Theatre Designer Judith van Praag for the Dutch production of The Kingdom:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/judithvanpraag/collections/304915-the-kingdom-costume-sketches

  

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